Our Opinion: Sunshine?

Legislature again chips away at open government

That's the sound of Florida's commitment to open government being slowly eroded.

In the recently completed session, the Legislature created 12 new exemptions to open records laws, the most since 2007, according to the First Amendment Foundation. Legislators cited a threat to people, or at least a threat to efficiency, in each case. But a right, once surrendered, is hard to win back, and we should be asking our legislators why they are limiting open government because of imagined threats or even mere inconvenience.

This session saw the good, the bad and the ugly for open government.

Among the good was passage of CS/SB 50, or the "Right to speak." A reaction to a court ruling, this bill tells boards and commissions that, in most cases, they can't make a decision without offering citizens a reasonable opportunity to speak first. With a unanimous vote in the Senate and only two nays in the House, lawmakers made a strong statement that taking our concerns to our elected officials is a basic right. Legislators also passed several bills expanding government transparency.

The ugly included a bill to exempt the email addresses of voters from public record. As originally written, the bill could have been read to exempt the email address of any voter engaging in any way with government. It was amended to limit the exemption to email addresses "obtained for the purpose of voter registration." Still, the reasons for this bill - the threat of so-far nonexistent fraud and the fear that elections officials would be inconvenienced by voters withholding email addresses - are weak ones for limiting open government.

The bad included House Bill 731, opposed by the First Amendment Foundation, that exempts names, addresses and other information of the spouses and children of current and former law enforcement personnel and some others. It is a perfect example of a bill making a further jumble of a problematic list of exemptions.

Most people would sympathize with the threat that the families of police or corrections officers might face. It makes sense to exempt the address of a police officer from public record, and that already is in current law.

But in exempting the names of spouses and children, this bill creates a level of anonymity that could make it difficult to root out nepotism or special deals. Should you be able to request the name of the sheriff's wife?

It's also not just about law enforcement.

Current exemptions include, for example, the names of the spouses and children of "assistant managers of any local government agency ? whose duties include hiring and firing employees."

HB 731 adds to these the names of the spouses and children of current or former state attorneys, assistant state attorneys, statewide prosecutors and assistant statewide prosecutors.

Certainly, any of those might have angered somebody along the way. But we don't slam the door to open government every time somebody has an ax to grind.

Barbara Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation, termed the exemptions "willy-nilly." For example, why would we exempt the names of the spouses and children of former code enforcement officers but not those of current judges or Supreme Court justices?

Ms. Petersen not only argues against this anonymity in our public records but also adds that much of this information already is available elsewhere on the Internet. In other words, the bad guys probably are using Google, not a public records request.